The Full Catastrophe (17 page)

On the lawn in front of the entrance sat an array of supportive unions. The Panhellenic Federation of Employees in Public Financial Services, the Association of Workers in Institutions for the Mentally Ill and Vulnerable Social Groups, the Greek Federation of Bank Employees Unions. Some had impossible acronyms, such as EDOEAP, which was the United Journalistic Organization for Supplementary Insurance Care. Next to a few olive trees sat members of the Association of Waiters, Cooks, and Other Employees of the Catering Industry. Next to them hung their banner:
IN RESPONSE TO THE ATTACK OF THE BOSSES WE RESPOND WITH CLASS SOLIDARITY AND ORGANIZING
. Satellite trucks nearby continued to broadcast ERT programs, which were being streamed online. Inside, a hastily organized security apparatus of ERT employees checked my press credentials and noted my name; a precaution, they said,
to screen out government agents and police. I walked upstairs to the broadcaster’s cafeteria, which was full of commiserating employees. Behind the counter were servings of roasted half chickens and boiled potatoes, but people mainly seemed to stick to the coffee and cigarettes. As I watched the small lady briskly working the cash register, I asked her where the money was going, given that the broadcaster officially didn’t exist anymore. She glanced at me with a look of disdain. “What money?” she said. “We need to pay our salaries!”

I sat down at one of the tables and met a friendly, thirty-eight-year-old mezzo-soprano in the ERT choir named Maria Karagiannaki, whose blue knit sweater matched the hue of her generously applied eye shadow. She began to defend the choir, although I hadn’t asked any accusatory questions. “It’s not true that we only perform two or three times a year,” she said to me. “Yes, some productions were very expensive, but it’s the politicians who signed off on those.” She went on to tell me that her choir performed very well despite being short-staffed. “How do you perform a Verdi’s
Requiem
with just thirty-five people?” A performance of Beethoven had won them so much praise, she said, that some people suggested they go to Germany to teach the Germans how to sing it. As we talked, I found it hard to think of this mezzo-soprano as the embodiment of the public sector problem. Her take-home pay was 900 euros a month, she told me. To be sure, she said, ERT needed some big changes, and a lot of the things people said about the wasteful spending and the nepotistic hiring were true. “But the politicians made it this way,” she said.

She had a point about that. Greek politicians had certainly long cultivated ERT’s excesses, just as they had cultivated many of the other excesses they were being forced to rein in. Parliamentarians, after all, were charged with appointing ERT’s board of directors, who were then in positions to hire politicians’ friends and family, and also to influence the news programming so that it was favorable to the government. Government ministers would routinely
call ERT to tell its journalists how to report stories. Some people recognized these problems long before ERT was closed, but met fierce political resistance when they tried to do something about it. In 2011, a then government minister, Elias Mossialos, proposed a plan to improve the quality and objectivity of ERT’s coverage by making its leadership independent of the government. In order to reduce the excessive costs, Mossialos also suggested cutting down on much of the television programming, which few people watched anyway. Everyone including the New Democracy party, led by Samaras, the one who later closed ERT for its unredeemable sins, rejected the idea. Simos Kedikoglou, the politician who later announced ERT’s closure on television, back then told an ERT reporter that Mossialos’s reform proposal was going “totally in the wrong direction.” It would result in economic damage, lost jobs, and the transfer of valuable public assets to private interests, he said. Also, he added, cutting ERT broadcasts in border regions would dangerously cede those frequencies to neighboring enemies like the Turks. It’s unlikely that Kedikoglou only learned of ERT’s problems two years later, when he announced the shutdown. After all, Kedikoglou, a journalist by trade, had worked at ERT earlier in his career.

In addition to its regular employees, ERT hired numerous “consultants” for its programs, but whether many of them did much consulting was questionable. I ran into what seemed an example of this practice while briefly subletting an Athens apartment from a musician couple. As far as I first knew, the couple made a living performing music, and while their endeavors were not very lucrative, they seemed to be well taken care of by a parent. The couple had apartments in Athens, at least one in Paris, and a house on an Aegean island. They had sublet their main Athens dwelling, they told me, because they were struggling to make money playing music, and were planning on moving to Paris to begin anew. This was not unusual. Many young Greeks were leaving the country on account of the near impossibility of finding a
good job. After ERT’s closure, the musician couple seemed demoralized, and then canceled their Paris plans. At first, I didn’t understand what ERT had to do with Paris. One of them explained that they had been acting as consultants for an arts program on ERT. Now that the program no longer existed, they had lost their main source of income, and could no longer afford to move to Paris. The musicians had told me about an aunt of theirs I should definitely talk to for my reporting; she knew
everybody
in terms of politicians. I wondered if that’s how they got their consulting gigs, but I never had the courage to ask.

ERT employees widely acknowledged the nepotism and other problems, though no one admitted to benefiting from it. Rather, many reacted to their government’s maladroit move to fire them with a high degree of self-aggrandizement.
UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY AND NOW LOSS OF CULTURE
, read a banner employees hung from the ERT building.
THIS IS THE PRICE FOR
€. Workers portrayed their occupation of the building as a defense of the “the voice of the Greek people.” For months, ERT journalists continued rogue news broadcasts largely dedicated to resisting their demise, as if it was the most important global issue of the time. The reports, to put it euphemistically, lacked objectivity, and were interspersed with public service announcements protesting the closure. On one news program, a reporter summarized an article in
The Economist
that said the handling of ERT had made Greeks more skeptical of their government’s ability to implement reforms. The reporter left out that the article also said: “Few Greeks watch ERT’s four television channels; its programs are dull and its new anchors are political stooges.” News programs also frequently aired panel discussions consisting of ERT employees. A balding ERT technician named Nikos called the government’s action part of a “crisis of values.” He would not let the government take away the “values passed on from our teachers and our parents,” the “values we are struggling for and keep as our North Star.” I had met another technician, also named Nikos, during my visits to ERT. He told me to
be wary when people told me their baseline salaries, because in reality, many received union-negotiated perks. Technicians, he told me, received a 10 percent bonus for being technicians, a 10 percent bonus for being trade union members, and a 20 percent bonus for doing hazardous work. “It was a party that was going on,” he said. “Until the moment when it stopped.”

After my conversation with the mezzo-soprano, I found the news television studio and met Kostas Karikis, a short man with a graying buzz cut, a large nose, and small eyes that evaded direct contact with mine. He was forty-three, and his job was to come up with the headlines that streamed across the television screen during news broadcasts. We found an empty office to sit in, and he rolled a cigarette and used a soda bottle as an ashtray. The decision to close ERT, he said, was clearly political. “They want a channel that is more subordinate to the government. That’s my opinion.” He had not finished university, and he feared that if he lost this job, he’d never find another. He would not starve; he had an aunt who was a doctor and could help him, he said. But still, the thought of losing the job made him extremely depressed.

“I’m not young,” he said. “I’m not very handsome. I’m not qualified. I don’t have a degree. The only thing I know how to do is to do my job well and to use words to make a living. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know if I can live without all these things.” Karikis then uttered what I thought to be a pretty fair assessment of the larger political situation in Greece. “This society is a society that has been very dependent on state money,” he said, extinguishing his cigarette. “It’s a communistic capitalism which gives people a small slice of state money so they will shut the fuck up and continue to bear the stealing. Now they say it’s our fault because we received the state money.” He paused and snapped: “Bullshit!” Then he added in a calmer voice, “We are bearing the weight of the public deficit because of our very big salaries? That is a myth. That is not half true. It’s maybe one-quarter true.”

I returned to ERT a few days later and found a stage had been
set up on the lawn outside. ERT musicians were giving concerts to draw crowds and keep the protests alive. I walked inside, went through security, and found Karikis in the television control room. It was a big news night. The leaders of Greece’s coalition government were meeting to discuss ERT. The two left-leaning coalition parties spoke out against the prime minister’s action, and a lot of people at ERT were predicting the government’s collapse, a result that could mean they would keep their jobs. In the control room, about a dozen laid-off employees sat in front of about a dozen screens. Karikis stood in front of one of them. His stubble had grown into a beard and he had bags under his eyes. He’d been sleeping on a couch in the ERT building in order to guard against a police raid, which was expected to come in the middle of any one of those nights. Beside Karikis, a young woman sat typing on an oversized keyboard. The control room was loud. Everyone spoke at the same time, and the two people in charge yelled over everyone else. “Write ‘No Agreement Between the Three Party Leaders!’ ” shouted one of the superiors. Karikis repeated the line to the young woman at the big keyboard, who then typed it, and then it appeared on the screen. Karikis yelled back to the superior, suggesting they write that the coalition’s survival remained a question mark. The superior shot him down, saying it was premature to speculate about such a collapse. “I said ‘question mark’!” Karikis yelled in his defense. The superior yelled back: “All-Night Thriller of Political Developments.” Karikis repeated it, the young woman typed it, and it appeared on the screen. One of the bosses, a small man who was the loudest of them all, called for “dramatic tone” to play over the background. He then demanded a split screen that mimicked the private broadcast channels he was monitoring from his terminal. The woman in charge of screen splitting protested. One side of the split screen would be an empty podium awaiting a politician, and that would be stupid, she said. “Split screen! When I say split screen, you split the screen,” the little man said. “We’re
showing the thriller. It’s the anticipation. When I say split screen, you split the screen.” The underling obeyed, but commanded her boss to “relax” in return. “No, I’ll yell,” he said. “You just split the screen. Period.” At one point, the location where the politician was about to speak was misidentified in an on-screen headline. Karikis reacted as if a baby had been run over, bringing his hands to his temples and unleashing a banshee wail as the woman at the typewriter corrected it.

Several politicians spoke on the screens that night. All that was clear was that the three parties didn’t concur on the wisdom or legality of the closure. Still, the possibility of a government collapse and new elections was remote. The previous summer, Greece had undergone two national elections within a month in order for a shaky coalition government to emerge, and in the process, the country nearly fell apart. New elections only one year later would have tipped the country over the brink. By the time I left ERT’s studio that night, however, it still wasn’t clear how the matter would pan out. Karikis was optimistic, though. As he walked me out of the control room, he predicted early elections. Syriza would take over and reopen ERT. “It looks like we’re safe and the government is falling apart.”

It would take a while longer for Karikis’s prediction to come true. The conservative-led government survived for the time being, though the smallest party of the tripartite coalition, the Democratic Left, which despite its communist roots had joined the coalition due to a competing pro-euro orientation, eventually withdrew over the ERT affair. The two remaining factions—PASOK and New Democracy—held on to power by a handful of seats. Despite its weakened position, the government said the change was positive. It was now free of the departed leftists’ meddling, which made it fitter to implement reforms with efficiency. ERT employees continued to occupy the facilities and send pirate broadcasts through the fall. One November morning at 4:00, however, five
months after ERT was shut down, riot police entered the building and seized control of it. The ERT employees had fought with tenacity, but now only a Syriza victory could save them.

While ERT employees were the first to be laid off, that is not to say public employees had until then escaped the nation’s economic free fall unscathed. The Troika sought to undo the steep pay raises civil servants had received in the decade preceding the crisis, and Greek government workers saw their paychecks cut by as much as 35 percent. This was intended not only to reduce the government’s wage bill, but to make the Greek economy more competitive. Since public wage levels have a direct effect on private wages, a reduction in the former would result in a cheaper overall labor force, allowing Greece to export products at more competitive prices, the thinking went. Or as I heard some Greeks put it, the plan was to make wages as low as in China, so that Greeks, too, would one day supplicate for jobs assembling iPads until their fingers went numb. The Troika’s plan certainly seemed to work, as average incomes in Greece fell about one-quarter in the years following the outbreak of the crisis. It was not clear, however, that the Greek government would be able to sustain all the public wage cuts it had been forced to implement. Unions took the government to court over the cuts, and by 2014, had some success rolling them back. Greece’s highest court, for instance, ruled that wage and pension cuts for police and members of the armed forces were unconstitutional. Judges predictably deemed pension cuts for the judiciary unconstitutional.